Jim Carling came with me to look for bathtubs. I was thankful for this; despite the sharp words in the morning, I was starting to really like Jim. Aside from ferrying me cheerfully everywhere I wanted to go, he kept up the conversation about boat ownership and whether it would be possible to make your way around the world in a boat of this size, and, if so, where would you go? We had fun with that one. Jim wanted to go to the Far East. I said I wasn’t going to go anywhere in the Indian Ocean because of the threat of Somali pirates. All of this was arbitrary anyway because I had never driven a boat before, much less negotiated the open sea.
We didn’t come back with a tub, although there were some reasonable ones in a salvage yard in Sittingbourne. I was on the lookout for a hip bathtub, maybe even a genuine Victorian one, something I could manage to connect to the boat’s plumbing without too much hassle.
We stopped and had lunch in a café at a garden center—baked potato for me, salad for him—with pots of tea. It felt very domestic, shopping together on a weekend.
“Is there anywhere else you need to go?” he asked.
I laughed. “You don’t have to be my taxi,” I said. “It’s very kind of you, but I wouldn’t want to take advantage.”
We drove home to the marina, and, because it seemed like the most appropriate thing to do with the fading afternoon, we went back to bed. The boat was chilly. I took him by the hand and into the bedroom. He was skillful and patient, his big hands decisive and firm.
By the time we’d tired ourselves out, it was dark. I went to the galley and lit the stove to warm the boat up, and then came back to bed. I thought for a moment he was asleep but he moved to let me under the covers, and pulled me against him.
“It should start to warm up soon,” I said. “The stove’s really efficient when it gets going.”
“Mm,” he said. “I should think about going home.”
“Really?”
“I don’t have any clean clothes. And I need to do stuff at home—laundry, you know.”
“Oh.”
He was kissing my arm, making the hairs on it rise in anticipation. “You could come home and stay with me.”
“No,” I said.
“Why?”
I laughed. “I don’t sleep well on dry land.”
“You don’t have to actually sleep.”
It was at that moment that I realized. I wanted to tell him. Maybe not all of it, but enough to make him understand.
“I have to stay on the boat.”
“Why?”
“The men who came on the boat and tied me up—I think they were looking for something. If I leave the boat, they’ll come back.”
“What were they looking for?”
“I’m not sure. I just know that they turned the boat upside down, and I assume that means they were looking for something.”
He sat up in bed, bunching the pillows behind him, and turned on the light overhead. “If you don’t know what they were looking for,” he said with impeccable logic, “how do you know they didn’t find it?”
I blinked at him.
“You have to tell me, Genevieve.”
“No, I don’t.”
He shook his head slowly. “God,” he said, more to himself than to me, “why am I even here? This is fucking crazy.”
“Look,” I said, trying to comfort him, “I’m not scared of them. Not really. They are bad people, but I’ve dealt with them before. I just need to figure out a way to get whatever it is off my boat so that I’m not a target for them anymore.”
“Caddy Smith,” he said, “you knew her, didn’t you?”
I nodded my head.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“You said her name was Candace.”
“Don’t play dumb, Genevieve. You knew it was her when you saw her in the water. You lied in your statement.”
“No, I didn’t. It was dark. I saw a body. It looked like her, but I wasn’t sure.”
“You’ve got to tell me, Genevieve. What do you mean, ‘you’ve dealt with them before’? Who are they? What do they want from you?”
I didn’t answer.
He got out of bed and started to collect his clothes, which, once again, were scattered all over my bedroom floor. I watched him silently, wondering which part of the whole bloody mess had sparked off this sudden change in mood. Just because I didn’t want to make everything worse? Just because I didn’t want to tell him about all the shit at the Barclay? What was he planning to do, anyway—go and ask Fitz nicely to leave me alone?
He was nearly fully dressed now, pulling his sweater over his head.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“I’m going home,” he said. “Crazy as it is, the offer’s still there if you want to come with me. But I’m guessing you won’t.” He was so angry. And maybe he was disappointed in me, too. When he’d finished dressing, he came over to the bed and kissed me hard, fiercely, as if it might be the last time. I put my arms around his neck and tried to pull him back to bed but he wasn’t having any of that.
It was a kiss goodbye.
It was on my second visit to Fitz’s house that everything began to change, for all of us: for Fitz, for Dylan, for Caddy, and for me.
I’d been looking forward to it all week, not just because these weekends were going to be giving such an impressive boost to my savings, even if I hadn’t managed to negotiate a better pay deal for it—this time, Caddy had agreed to do the party with me.
Added to which, not having to deal with Dunkerley at work was a bonus. Gavin had been made our temporary manager, and it was pretty much like working for your best friend: we got on with things as we always had, but it felt more as though we were laughing about it instead of stepping over each other’s twitching bodies in the desperate fight to close deals.
It wasn’t Dylan who collected me that evening, but Nicks. He sat in the car outside until I was ready and stayed there; I let myself into the backseat and then we drove off into the traffic.
“Where’s Caddy?” I asked.
He moved his shoulders in some kind of lazy shrug and then barely said a word to me the whole trip. I plugged into my music and went over my moves in my head, planning where I could make tweaks, considering what I would do if the option arose for Fitz to bend the rules again. I’d kind of set the precedent now by doing it once; it was more or less accepted that I would be asked to do it again. No matter. The money was the important thing. If it got me closer to the boat, I was prepared to do it. And if he wanted me to go further still? No point worrying about it now. I would decide when the time came.
We pulled up to the rear of the house this time, and I went straight in through the back door to the kitchen. As before, the caterers were busy preparing food, a sit-down meal by the look of it.
I found a comfy chair in the corner and kept myself busy with a notebook I’d brought with me, full of plans and clippings from various boat magazines. I was so engrossed in it that I didn’t even notice Dylan until he was standing right beside me, eclipsing the light from the kitchen.
“Hi!” I said, removing an earbud. “I didn’t know you were here.”
He looked at me without expression. “You’re not on till later. They’re having dinner in the dining room in half an hour. Fitz wants to know if you’d like to join them.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Nope.”
“Just me?”
“You and a few others. There’s a seating plan.”
“Oh. Dylan, do you know where Caddy is? She’s supposed to be here, too.”
“She’s upstairs, I think.”
I accepted this without comment, pissed off that my evening of entertainment with my best buddy was not turning out quite the way I’d hoped.
“Am I sitting next to someone I should know about?” I said.
“You’re between Fitz and Leon Arnold.”
I dropped my voice to a whisper. “Who’s Leon Arnold?”
He looked at me as though I’d asked the wrong question. “Owns a yacht. You’ll get on well with him. And if you don’t, you should pretend to. And be careful with him.”
“What do you mean, ‘be careful’?”
He took a moment to reply. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll keep an eye on him.”
There was no point pressing him for a more specific answer. It was another test, I realized. Good thing I’d brought enough outfits with me so that I could select something suitable for an evening meal. I went to the downstairs bathroom and got changed, put makeup on, and twisted my hair up into french pleat that I hoped looked classically elegant.
The dining room was empty but the table was laid for ten; through open doors on the other side I heard sounds of polite conversation, a woman’s laugh, so I went to the door cautiously and looked through.
They were all in there—Fitz and some other men, one of whom I recognized from the last party. There were women in there, too; I recognized a girl from the Barclay—Stella? She’d danced there a few times, but usually she worked at one of Fitz’s other clubs. And standing next to Fitz, resplendent in a jeweled black cocktail dress and a pair of killer heels, was Caddy. She gave me a little wave.
Three of the girls were on their own in a corner, giggling over some private joke. I saw Fitz cast a displeased glance over to them before resuming his conversation with the man to his right. I went over to the girls with a glass of champagne I’d lifted from the tray of a passing waitress and said to them quietly, “Ladies, aren’t you supposed to be mingling?”
Two of them looked worried, but one of them—an acid blonde with pale blue eyes—said, “Fuck’s it got to do with you?”
I treated her to a warm smile. “It doesn’t pay to piss Fitz off,” I said sweetly, “and he’s already shooting daggers at you. Just a bit of friendly advice.”
As I left them and headed for Fitz, the girls seemed to come to their senses and split from their cozy huddle, making their way toward the remaining guests.
“Viva,” Fitz said to me as I approached. “Come and meet Leon.”
Fitz slipped an arm around my waist and kissed my cheek as I shook Leon Arnold’s hand. He was maybe fifty, the same height as me, with a shaved head and capped teeth. A good suit, a diamond stud in one earlobe.
“I’m pleased to meet you,” I said. “I understand I’m the lucky girl who gets to sit next to you at dinner.”
He looked as though he might take a little warming up, but what the hell? I was already thinking of my potential bonus for taking care of Fitz’s girls and for softening up Mr. Arnold for whatever scheme Fitz had planned for him. What I hadn’t figured on, though, was the look Caddy was giving me. She wasn’t smiling. She was looking at me as though I were something she’d found on the sole of her shoe.
“Hey,” I said to her, as we filed in to dinner, “I was wondering where you were.”
“You’re sitting next to Fitz,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “Dylan told me.”
I read something in her eyes, something she wasn’t telling me.
“What?” I said.
“Don’t get too close to them,” she said. “Don’t get close to either of them. Understand?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She didn’t seem to hear me. Whatever. This wasn’t the time or the place.
Over dinner, the topic of business seemed to be strictly off-limits. Stella told everybody about an audition she’d had to dance in a music video; one of the other men, a younger version of Fitz, told her he was looking for girls to appear as extras in a film he was producing. After that they were all over him.
I chatted with Leon Arnold over dinner, asked him about his yacht, about cruising around the islands in the Mediterranean. More than once I cast a glance in Fitz’s direction to check I was doing the right thing. He gave me a smile, which reassured me. The rest of the time he was busy talking to the man who was sitting on the other side of him, an older man with a neatly trimmed gray beard. Caddy seemed to have been tasked with entertaining him—she kept her focus on him and away from me.
I managed to eat most of the soup and then picked at my dinner, pushing it around the plate even though it looked delicious—in any other circumstances I would have wolfed it and asked for seconds. Not eating allowed me to devote all my attention to Leon, who, despite his yacht and his Rolex Oyster and his unconscionable amount of money, was decidedly dull.
Stella was sitting on the other side of Leon, and when her attempts at enlivening the conversation with the dark-haired man on her right failed, she turned her attention to Leon and left me momentarily free to check out the men I’d be dancing for later.
“How’s your food?” Fitz asked me.
I felt my face flush a little. “It’s delicious,” I said. “I’m hoping there might be some leftovers for when I’ve finished dancing.”
He smiled and under the table his hand made contact with my thigh.
“What time do you want us to start?” I asked.
He shrugged. “We’ve got business to discuss, so . . . after that. I’ll send one of the lads for you when we’re ready. Kitten’s going to do some private dances, if they want them.”
“Caddy isn’t pole dancing?”
He gave me an amused smile. “No, Viva. You’re here for that.”
I tried a different tack. “Thank you for inviting me for dinner,” I said.
“You’re good at this,” he said.
“At what?”
“At knowing what they like. And you worked things out with the girls earlier. I appreciate that.”
I glanced down the table at the three blondes, who were animatedly discussing their potential careers in the music industry with the three young men.
The girls were all there for sex, I realized. It came to me in a moment, even though I’d probably known it all along. When Dylan had said to me last time, “You’re the only one dancing,” I’d thought that meant there would be girls from the club serving drinks, maybe doing lap dances, but when I hadn’t seen any other girls, I didn’t give it another thought. Now, I realized, they’d all been upstairs; and the last time, while I was being felt up by Kenny and dancing for the other clients of Fitz’s who’d gathered here, the remaining men had probably been upstairs being entertained by the other girls.
“You know,” I said to Fitz, “you should think about diversifying the club a bit.”
Another amused smile. “Diversifying?”
“You could do a couple of ladies’ nights—get some men in to dance as well as girls. And maybe a burlesque night, something with a bit more”—I searched for the most appropriate word—“widespread appeal.”
“Ah, but widespread appeal means reduced profits.”
“But you must admit, you’re serving a very limited pool of customers at the moment,” I said. “Think about all the people who wouldn’t dream of setting foot in the club as it is now. Couples. Girls’ nights out. Bacherlorette parties, if you like.”
Leon Arnold leaned over me, one arm heavy across my shoulders. He smelled of whiskey and aftershave. “You want to watch yourself with this one, Fitz, old boy,” he said. “She’s gonna take over your empire.”
My reply was swift. “No, I want to stick to what I’m good at—dancing for gorgeous men like you, Leon.”
Fitz laughed then, and Caddy gave me a sharp look from the other side of the table.
As soon as dinner was over and I could excuse myself, I went back to the kitchen, found a bottle of water to try to dilute the half-glass of champagne and the half-glass of red wine I’d drunk, and took it with me to the downstairs bathroom. Dylan was waiting at the breakfast bar, munching on a dish of nachos.
“Don’t they feed you properly?” I asked cheekily.
He looked up. “I thought they were going to take you upstairs, with the rest of the tramps,” he teased back.
“I’d better get changed,” I said. “Come in and talk to me if you like.”
Dylan shook his head. “Fitz wouldn’t like that,” he said.
“What?”
“Us having a private chat.”
I thought back to what Fitz had said about having a problem with Dylan liking me. And I remembered the part about someone having noticed us talking in the club.
“Fitz is busy,” I said.
There was nobody else around; the caterers had packed up their stuff and gone already. He followed me into the bathroom and sat on the easy chair while I stripped off the evening gown and replaced it with a sparkly cutaway dress in electric blue.
“Do you know what’s up with Caddy?” I asked. She’d gone right into the lounge with Fitz and Arnold, arm in arm with both of them, leaving me no chance to take her aside.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“She’s giving me filthy looks. I don’t know what I’ve done to upset her.”
He stared at me and then a slow smile crossed his face.
“What?” I asked. “What’s going on, Dylan?”
“You were getting cozy with Fitz,” he said.
“So what? And anyway, I wasn’t ‘getting cozy.’ I was socializing, which is what I think I’m being paid for.”
“Calm down,” he said. “I just meant that she wouldn’t like you being cozy with Fitz, because she’s got a thing for him.”
“Caddy and Fitz? They’re a couple?”
He smiled again. “Well, in her dreams maybe.”
Lots of things were starting to make sense. “But he’s not so keen on her?”
“He fucked her once or twice. He used to fuck all the girls, the ones that would let him, that is. Then he had a couple of them go a bit nuts on him and he realized it was a bad idea. One of them got pregnant. Trouble is, he didn’t exactly finish with Caddy, not in any official sort of way, so she still thinks she’s got a shot.”
“Why doesn’t he just tell her he’s not interested?”
“I don’t think he has the faintest clue how she feels. And if she told him straight out, he’d get rid of her. He doesn’t like his girls clingy, not anymore.”
“No wonder she was shooting daggers at me,” I said, remembering Fitz’s arm around my waist, his wet whiskey-kiss on my cheek.
“What do you make of Leon Arnold?” he asked me then.
“Seems all right,” I said. “Why?”
Dylan scratched his jaw line thoughtfully. “He’s a big player, that’s all. Last time you were here, the guys Fitz was talking to, that was all about setting up this meeting with Arnold.”
“Really?” I said. “I’m glad I didn’t know that earlier. I’d have been nervous.”
“I never met him before. Heard of him, of course.”
“You think this deal is a bad idea?”
“Fitz knows what he’s doing.”
“What’s he want?”
“With Arnold? Same as always—earn his fortune. Like you.” His tone suggested that this was the end of the discussion. “Just better do a good job dancing, is all.”
I pulled my hair out of the pleat, shaking it free, and took off the low-heeled sandals that were useful for socializing with men who were shorter than me. In my bag I had a pair of high-heeled patent shoes with a velvet ribbon that crisscrossed around my ankle and reminded me of the ballet lessons I’d had when I was nine years old.
“I’m glad you’re here,” I said.
He shrugged.
“Nothing gets to you, does it, Dylan?”
“What’s that mean?”
“I don’t know. You must care about something. There must be someone who really means something to you. You married?”
He didn’t answer, which I took to mean that he was.
“Come on,” I said. “I thought we were friends. I thought you said you trusted me.”
“I was with someone,” he said. “Not anymore.”
“Any kids?”
There was a long pause. This was like pulling teeth.
“I’ve got a daughter. Lauren. She’s fourteen.”
“You see her often?”
“Not often enough. She lives in Spain, with her mother.”
“Oh. Spain—that must be hard on you.”
“Yeah, anyway, are you ready?” The conversation was clearly at an end.
“Will you be watching?” I asked him.
“Don’t have much choice,” he said.
I went to wait in the kitchen like a good girl, while Dylan headed upstairs to the sitting room to check that the other girls weren’t getting too drunk.
When Carling had gone, I got dressed in my jeans and fleece and went to the Scarisbrick Jean. Malcolm and Josie were just finishing their dinner: pasta with some kind of sauce that smelled of garlic.
“You hungry?” Josie asked me cheerfully. She looked pale despite her colorful sweater. She’d had her hair done in preparation for the wedding—was it her niece’s?—and in place of the usual dark threaded with silver it was a warm chocolate color. It made her look years younger.
“No, no,” I lied, “I’ve just eaten.”
“Nonsense,” she said, “we’ve got leftovers.”
She spooned some tagliatelle and sauce onto a plate and I sat down at their dinette. “Your hair looks gorgeous,” I said.
I saw a pointed look pass between Malcolm and Josie. Malcolm’s hair, I noticed, remained resolutely wild.
“Thank you,” she said firmly, as if making a point. I wondered if Malcolm had failed to notice and was somehow living in purgatory as a result. He wasn’t looking particularly cheerful.
“How have you been?” I asked Josie quietly.
“Oh, you know. Up and down.” There were tears in her eyes but she blinked them away with a deep breath. She took her plate and Malcolm’s to the sink in the galley and started doing the dishes, banging and crashing cabinet doors with enough gusto to drown out the rest of the conversation.
“My battery’s charged,” I said to Malcolm between mouthfuls.
He looked up then. “Yeah. Probably is.”
“And they didn’t take it. You know.”
“Right.”
“What’s up?” I asked, realizing the distinct displeasure in his tone was directed at me.
“You,” he said. “Fraternizing with the gavvers.”
“You mean Carling? He’s all right. He helped me look for a tub.”
He looked at me for a moment as though he didn’t know quite what to make of me, and then he laughed out loud, his head back.
“Look,” I said, when he’d finished sniggering at the thought of me and a police officer looking at bathtubs, “I needed protection last night, all right? He was happy to stay. So this morning I’m still alive.”
“Whatever,” he said, wiping a tear from his eye.
“I need to move the boat, Malcolm. Those people will probably come back for another go.”
“Tomorrow, we’ll do it tomorrow. All right? Too dark now to do anything. You can sleep here tonight, if you don’t want to be in that boat on your own.”
I looked up and down the length of the boat. “Sleep where?”
He tapped a bony finger against the side of his nose. “Aha,” he said. “You’ll need a duvet or something; we don’t have anywhere to keep spares.”
“I can’t leave the boat, Malcolm. What if they come back tonight?”
“You could bring it with you. This package of yours.”
“Don’t be silly. Then I’d be putting you and Josie in danger, too. Besides, it’s obviously well hidden where it is, right?”
He stared at me for a moment, deep in thought. Then he said, “I’ve got an idea.”
I went back to the Revenge of the Tide and collected the duvet, a pillow, and my toothbrush, as well as my cell phones. When I came back to the Aunty Jean, Malcolm was out on the dock with some fine-grade steel wire and a pair of pliers.
“What’s he doing out there?” Josie asked as I climbed down into the cabin with armfuls of duvet.
“Oh, I don’t know—fixing something, I guess,” I said.
“It’s going to be lovely having you here. Like a sleepover.”
I had no idea what she thought I was doing, sleeping on their boat when mine was just ten feet or so farther up the dock. Malcolm had told her something about the stove needing looking at and that had seemed to satisfy any curiosity.
When all the dishes had been cleared away, Josie showed me the hidden single bed that slid out from under the dinette like a giant drawer. Of course, while it was out they would need to step over me if they wanted to get from the dinette to the galley or back again, but the likelihood of that in the middle of the night was fortunately quite slim.
Outside, Malcolm was putting the finishing touches to the elaborate set of trip wires he had fixed at ankle-height across our dock. If Nicks or any of Fitz’s men came to have another go at the boat tonight they would make enough noise to wake up the whole marina.
Once I got started, things progressed pretty much as they had for my first visit to Fitz’s house.
For the first dance, all the men were present except for Fitz and Arnold. I got the distinct impression that I was there to babysit the other men while they took care of whatever business they had to discuss, in private.
True to his word, Dylan stood in the doorway, watching as I did my routine, monitoring me and keeping an eye on the guests, as he had been told to do. He blended into the background, motionless and silent.
I’d just finished when the door opened and Fitz and Arnold came in, bringing Caddy with them. She was a little unsteady on her feet. I gave her a warm smile, which she did not return.
“Aw, look, Leon—we’ve just missed the first dance,” Fitz said, pouring two large glasses of whiskey from the liquor cabinet.
I blew a kiss to Leon. “I’ll be back soon,” I said to him. “Don’t miss the next one.”
I skipped out of the room and Dylan shut the door behind me. Just enough time for a very quick change in the bathroom, and some makeup repair.
The bathroom wasn’t empty; two of the blond girls from dinner were in there doing lines of coke on the polished marble countertop. They shut up as I opened the door and almost immediately started arguing again when they saw it was only me.
“Well, you can fuck right off,” the taller one said. She was wearing a terry-cloth robe and acrylic-heeled stilettos, and most likely not very much else.
“Don’t give me that,” came the reply, high-pitched, close to tears. “It was your fucking idea. Don’t back out now, come on!”
“What’s up?” I asked casually.
They both stared at me as though suddenly united in their concern that I was going to get involved and therefore somehow want to share the last two lines of powder that were still on the vanity unit.
“She,” said the younger one, pointing with a shaking, manicured finger at the blonde in the robe, “said we should try and get Leon in for a threesome and we could split the tip, and I said yeah, and now she’s changed her mind!”
There was a sigh and a hand on the hip in a gesture of defiance. “It wasn’t like that, Bella, you know it wasn’t, I was fucking joking, honestly.”
“Could be passing up a very lucrative opportunity,” I said, reapplying lip gloss.
“That’s exactly what I said!” exclaimed Bella.
“But, seriously, it would take a lot of fucking money for me to do him on my own, never mind with someone else to fucking worry about.”
“It’s called taking one for the team. Don’t expect you’ve ever heard of that, before, have you, Diane?”
“I’ve had enough of this shit. Are we doing this line or what?”
Differences set aside in the interest of ingesting drugs, the two girls bent for their second lines in turn and paused for a moment before continuing the argument.
“Would you do it?” Diane asked. It took me a second to realize that she was talking to me.
“Why are you two down here, anyway?” I said. “Shouldn’t you both be entertaining the guests?”
“Oh, don’t you start. You’re worse than fucking Dylan.”
“He’s always bloody nagging us. We came down here to get a moment’s peace—you know,” said Bella, nodding toward the smear of white residue before wiping it off the counter with a moistened finger and rubbing it on her gums.
“Come on, Bel,” said Diane, “let’s go and find somewhere warmer. Bit frosty in here.”
They left the bathroom to me, and I had a quick check through my bag to make sure my purse and phone were still there. I wouldn’t have trusted them with any of my belongings and I wasn’t surprised to find my bag unzipped. They’d probably gone in there to see if I had a stash of coke myself.
When the door opened again, I was about to tell them to fuck off and leave me alone, but this time it was Dylan.
“Hello,” I said, turning back to the mirror. “Don’t bother to knock or anything civilized like that, will you?”
“Seen it all before,” he said in reply. He sat himself down on the chair and regarded me thoughtfully.
“What?” I said at last, to his reflection in the mirror.
“Fitz is pissed off,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. “That’s not good.”
“The deal’s not going down.”
“Why not?”
“Some of Arnold’s lads have been sharing the samples with the girls upstairs.”
“That’ll explain why two of them were in here a minute ago powdering their noses.”
Dylan ran a weary hand over his forehead. “Fuck’s sake. They’re a fucking liability.” He stood up and headed toward the door with a sigh.
“Dylan?”
“What?”
“Anything I can do to help?”
He laughed. “You can cheer Fitz up, for starters. If anyone can put a smile back on his face, it’s you.”
“What about Caddy?”
“She’s upstairs. Sulking.”
I woke up before it was fully light.
For a second I had no idea where I was, only that I wasn’t in my bed; the boat was rocking alarmingly from side to side and, moments later, I heard footsteps near my head. I sat up with alarm.
“Go back to sleep,” came an urgent whisper. “It’s only me.”
“Malcolm? What’s going on?”
“I heard a noise outside,” he whispered, crouching down next to the pull-out mattress. “Think it’s just a fox or something, by the garbage. Nobody out there.”
“Oh.”
I lay back down on the bed and pulled the duvet up around my ears.
It was chilly now, light enough to see the outline of the cabin and the shapes of the galley cabinets, the woodstove, burned out and cold. I guessed it was about four or five, the same time of day that I’d found Caddy’s body in the water.
I thought of all those trip wires outside on the dock and hoped to God I would remember they were there when I went back to the Revenge of the Tide, otherwise I was likely to take a dip in the mud myself, headfirst, duvet and all.
I listened to the noise of the birds and the gulls and the distant roar of the traffic heading up the M2 toward London, and I was just drifting off to sleep when a sudden thought struck me. Malcolm had been fully dressed.